The International Tap Dance Hall of
Fame is the only tap dance hall of fame exclusively focused on tap dancers. It
features founding and innovative 20th and 21st century professional tap
dancers.With a collection of photographs, biographies, and videos, the Hall of
Fame is becoming a colorful and diverse retrospective of America's seminal tap
dance personalities.

2004 - Gregory
Hines (14 February 1946 - 9 August
2003), jazz tap dancer, singer, actor, musicians, and
creator of improvised tap choreography, was born in New York City, the son of
Maurice Hines Sr. and Alma Hines. He began dancing at the age of
not-quite-three, turned professional at age five, and for fifteen years
performed with his older brother Maurice as The Hines Kids, making nightclub
appearances across the country. While Broadway teacher and choreographer Henry
LeTang created the team's first tap dance routines, the brothers' absorption of
technique came from watching and working with the great black tap masters
whenever and wherever they performed at the same theaters. They practically grew
up backstage at the Apollo Theatre, where they were witness to the performances
and the advice of such tap dance legends as Charles "Honi" Coles, Howard
"Sandman" Sims, the Nicholas Brothers, and Teddy Hale (Gregory's personal source
of inspiration). Gregory and Maurice then grew into the Hines Brothers. When
Gregory was eighteen, he and Maurice were joined by their father, Maurice Sr.,
on drums, becoming Hines, Hines and Dad. They toured internationally and
appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, but the younger Hines was restless to
get away from the non-stop years on the road, so he left the group in his early
twenties and "retired" (so he said) to Venice, California. For a time he left
dancing behind, exploring alternatives that included his forming a jazz-rock
band called Severence. He released an album of original songs in
1973.

When Hines moved back to New York City in the late
1970s, he immediately landed a role in The Last Minstrel Show. The show closed
in Philadelphia, but launched him back into the performing arts, and just a
month later came Eubie (1978) a certified Broadway hit, which earned him the
first of four Tony nominations. Comin' Uptown (1980), though not a success, led
to another nomination and Sophisticated Ladies (1981) to a third. In 1992, Hines received the Tony Award for Best Actor in a
Musical for his riveting portrayal of the jazz man Jelly Roll Morton in George
C. Wolfe's production of Jelly's Last Jam, sharing a Tony nomination for
choreography for that show with Hope Clark and Ted Levy.

Hines made his initial transition from dancer/singer
to film actor in Mel Brooks' hilarious The History of the World, Part I (1981),
playing the role of a Roman Slave, that in one scene sees him sand-dancing in
the desert. He followed that in quick succession with Wolfen, an allegorical
mystery directed by Michael Wadleigh that is now a cult hit; in it, Hines played
the role of a coroner. In 1984, he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's film, The Cotton Club (1984).
Vincent Canby in The New York Times wrote about Hines' rare screen presence in
the film: "He doesn't sneak up on you. He's so laid back, so self assured and so
graceful, whether acting as an ambitious hoofer or tap dancing, alone or in
tandem with his brother, Maurice, that he forces YOU to sneak up on HIM. The
vitality and comic intelligence that have made him a New York favorite in Eubie
and Sophisticated Ladies translate easily to the screen." The film was a
seamless blend of dance into the framework of the narrative. The fierce
virtuosity of Hines' dancing is seen in the White Nights (1985), in
which he played an American defector to the Soviet Union opposite Mikhail
Baryshnikov, playing Russian defector to the United States. "I haven't had a
terribly traumatic experience as a black person in this world, but I've had
experiences," Hines told Michael J. Bandler about the film. "My nature is to let
them go--I wasn't going to be burdened with a negative attitude. So for White
Nights I had to dig, but the pain was there." In 1988, Hines starred in a film
that combined his penchant for both dance and drama, Tap. With full-scale
production numbers filmed on location in New York City and Hollywood, and with
an original soundtrack created especially for the look and style of the film,
Tap became the first dance musical to merge tap dancing with contemporary rock
and funk musical styles. It also featured a host of tap legends, including
Sandman Sims, Bunny Briggs, Steve Condos, Harold Nicholas and Hines' co-star and
show business mentor, Sammy Davis, Jr.

Hines' extensive and varied film resume includes
teaming with Billy Crystal in director Peter Hyam's hit comedy, Running Scared,
and the next year with Willem Dafoe, in Southeast Asia, in the military thriller
Off Limits. He starred in William Friedkin's dark comedy, Deal of the Century,
with Sigourney Weaver and Chevy Chase; Penny Marshall's military comedy,
Renaissance Man, co-starring Danny DeVito; The Preacher's Wife with Denzel
Washington and Whitney Houston, once again with director Penny Marshall; Waiting
to Exhale, with Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston for director Forest
Whittaker, and Good Luck, with co-star Vincent D'Onofrio. He also appeared in
the offbeat ensemble comedy, Mad Dog Time, with Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin,
Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Dreyfuss. In 1994, Hines expanded his talents to
include the role of film director. His directorial debut was the independent
feature, Bleedings Hearts, shot on location in New York. A contemporary romantic
drama, it explored the precarious relationship between a thirty-year-old, white,
male radical and a black, female high school student.

Hines work in television is equally diverse. In 1989,
he created and hosted Gregory Hines Tap Dance in
America, a PBS television special that featured veteran tap dancers,
established tap dance companies, and next generation of tap dancers. The film
was nominated for an Emmy award, as was his performance on Motown Returns to the
Apollo. On the USA Network, Hines starred with Annette O'Toole in the critically
acclaimed original film, White Lies, based on the novel Louisiana Black by
Samuel Charters. He also starred on TNT with Christopher Lloyd in Lewis Teague's
T-Bone and Weazel; with Sinbad, James Coburn and Burt Reynolds in the comedy
western, The Cherokee Kid; with Judd Hirsch and F. Murray Abraham in Showtime's
urban drama, The Color of Justice; on CBS-TV with Jean Smart in the thriller, A
Stranger in Town; on the USA Network in the psychological thriller, Dead Air,
and in Subway Series, the anthology-style film series for HBO directed by Ted
Demme. Hines made his television series debut in 1998, playing Ben Stevenson, a
loving single father hesitantly re-entering the dating world on CBS-TV series,
The Gregory Hines Show. As Ben Doucette, he made up part of the gifted ensemble
that won NBC an Emmy Award for Best Comedy Series in 2000 for Will and Grace. He
also earned an Emmy Nomination as Outstanding Lead in a Miniseries or Movie for
his portrayal on Showtime of the legendary and groundbreaking dancer/film star
Bill Robinson in Bojangles, and also
starred in the ABC/Touchstone mid season television series, Lost At Home. For
three years, Hines was the voice of "Big Bill" on Bill Cosby's animated series
for Nickelodeon, Little Bill. He voiced and sang one of the key characters
(alongside Eartha Kitt, Patti LaBelle and Vanessa Williams) in the Fox TV/Coca
Cola animated musical special, Santa Baby. He made his television directorial
debut with The Red Sneakers, for Showtime, and also appeared in the film, which
centers on a 17 year-old high school student--more mathematician than
athlete--who becomes a basketball sensation through the gift of a magical pair
of sneakers.

Throughout an amazingly varied career, Hines
continued to be a tireless advocate for tap in America. In 1988, he lobbied
successfully for the creation of National
Tap Dance Day, now celebrated in 40 cities in the United States and in eight
other nations. He was on the Board of Directors of Manhattan Tap, the Jazz Tap
Ensemble, and the American Tap Foundation (formerly the
American Tap Dance Orchestra). He was a generous artist and teacher, conscious
of his role as a model for such tap dance artists as Savion Glover, Dianne
Walker, Ted Levy, and Jane Goldberg, creating such tap choreographies as Groove (1998) for the
Jazz Tap Ensemble, and Boom for the 1997 Gala for President and Mrs. Bill
Clinton, filmed for (ABC) at the Ford Theater in Washington D.C.

Like a jazz musician who ornaments a melody with
improvisational riffs, Hines improvised within the frame of the dance. His
"improvography" demanded the percussive phrasing of a composer, the rhythms of a
drummer, and the lines of a dancer. While being the inheritor of the tradition
of black rhythm tap, he was also a proponent of the new. "He purposely
obliterated the tempos," wrote tap historian Sally Sommer, "throwing down a
cascade of taps like pebbles tossed across the floor. In that moment, he aligned
tap with the latest free-form experiments in jazz and new music and postmodern
dance." The New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff described Hines'
performance in 1995: "Visual elegance, as always, yields to aural power. The
complexity of sound grows in intensity and range."

In addition to his work on
the dance and theatre stage, in film and on television, Hines' wide-ranging
career also included making a 1987 album called Gregory Hines, and writing
introductions for books Brotherhood in Rhythm: The
Jazz Tap Dancing of the Nicholas Brothers by Constance Valis Hill, and Savion! My Life in Tap, a
biography by Mr. Glover for children. Everything Hines did was influenced by his
dancing, as he told Stephen Holden in a 1988 interview with The New York Times:
"Everything I do," he said, including "my singing, my acting, my lovemaking, my
being a parent." He died in Los Angeles at the age of fifty-seven.